Event Details

Our second book for our

Event Details

Our second book for our book club this year will be Empty Set, by Mexican-Argentinian author Verónica Gerber Bicecci. Oh, and so you know, Verónica will be in the shop 3 days later, on Thursday 5, to present the book, along with her translator, Christina McSweeney. So if you like the book, come back that Thursday to meet the author.

Empty Set is an experimental novel that juxtaposes narrative and diagrams in a cohesive mix. When words aren’t enough, and mumble, and vanish, they leave room for drawings, abstractions and diagrams; this novel doesn’t hesitate in creating its own language.

In Empty Set, a Venn diagram for love, Bicecci’s narrator traces and reconstructs her relationships using geometry, ice cores, and tree rings. How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences? Can tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop-skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.

“Veronica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt.” –Francisco Goldman

Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who writes. In 2013 she was awarded the third Aura Estrada Prize for Literature. She is an editor with Tumbona Ediciones, a publishing cooperative with a catalog that explores the intersections between literature and art.

As always, Book Club members (meaning you just show up) will enjoy a 10% discount on the next book club title and on every item they’ll ask for at the bar during the Book Club meeting.